Why We Write

by Meredith Maran

  Website: www.rickmoodybooks.com

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  Garden State, 1992

  The Ice Storm, 1994

  Purple America, 1997

  The Diviners, 2005

  The Four Fingers of Death, 2010

  Fiction Collections

  Demonology, short stories, 2001

  Right Livelihoods, novellas, 2007

  The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven, novella and short stories, 1995

  Memoir

  The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, 2002

  Film Adaptation

  The Ice Storm, 1997

  Rick Moody

  Why I write

  I abandoned two novels when I was in sixth grade. I got maybe ten pages into each. One was about a kid who becomes vice president. I still have the weird little blank book that I used when I attempted to write it. The itch to do my job goes at least that far back.

  Why do I write? To do better for myself than I am capable of doing with language, out there, in real time. To repair inabilities, to restore confidences. And, at this point, because I don’t know what else to do. I write just as I breathe and eat. Every day. Habitually.

  It would be easier if I could say that one thing happens when I write, or, perhaps, a number of predictable things happen. But the truth is that a great number of things have happened, over the years, when I have been writing, and that these things are unpredictable, hard to quantify, and mutable.

  I guess I have now been writing, if I date my writing from the first time I ever rewrote anything, for about thirty-three years. Publishing books for about twenty. Sometimes the writing is inspired or inspiring; sometimes it is destitute of anything but the need to keep working. I guess what I’m saying is that what happens to me is so variable that it would be kind of foolish to try to attach names to it. I do think, however, that just about whenever I am writing, or more accurately, whenever I have written, I feel better and more at peace as a human being. That doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that the literary product is any good.

  Responding to George Orwell’s “four great motives for writing”

  1. Sheer egoism. “To be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups in childhood, etc.”

  Writing out of bile, e.g., or out of some personal desire for gain—that just doesn’t square with what makes literature useful, profound, etc. My reason is mainly neurotic, I suspect: I am never really comfortable speaking, and writing allows me the time and serenity to make better what I cannot do in speech. It’s a peaceful and cloistered space, the page, where I don’t feel pressured the way I do in the world.

  2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. “To take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.”

  Yes, this is a possible reason to write. I imagine I am trying to think about prose the way I think about music. I try to think of prose as a musical form, not just as a code we agree to use in order to advance a plot. Aesthetic enthusiasm is mainly what motivates me, because aesthetic enthusiasm has no particular narrative requirements.

  3. Historical impulse. “The desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

  I sure hope posterity is interested in me, but I figure I’ll be dead by then, and you can’t take posterity with you when you are gone.

  4. Political purposes. “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

  A lovely sentence, really, and one I agree with. I think all art is political, but that some art, by being quiet about its politics, supports the status quo in a slightly sinister way. I have always tried to stake out political positions in what I do, but not in a manner, I hope, that is aesthetically dull (see number two), or too shrill, etc. I believe the two—aesthetics and politics—may go hand in hand. Even if that argument never sat well with the social realists nor with the art-for-art’s-sake crowd.

  Responding to Joan Didion

  “Writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.”

  If it were just this, the first person, I would probably want to give up and do something else with my life. Although there’s inevitability to “I,” to a point of view that starts with self, it is not all there is. There is also “thou,” as embodied in the reader. I see a real exchange with the reader, who is free to bring what she wants to the work. In this context, writing is not as expression of self, but as relief from self (T. S. Eliot, I believe).

  Responding to Terry Tempest Williams

  “I write to meet my ghosts.”

  Sounds interesting but might be too metaphorical and too hyperbolic for me.

  Nomenclature

  I am never terribly comfortable with the word writer.

  I had a teacher, when young, who said the word writer was unimportant. He said that all that was important was the work itself. And I sort of agree with this approach. I think there’s an instability that goes with writing, a lack of certainty, at least for me. This lack of certainty makes me more responsive to the world, more open to it. And so if I have to repel the word writer in order to maintain my openness and vulnerability to the world, then fine. I’ll let go of the word. I do use it sometimes for the sake of simplicity, or so as to avoid confusing people, but I never feel totally comfortable about it.

  First break

  The first break I got was having my first novel published after sixteen months or so of failing to get anyone interested in it. Seemed like a big break to me at the time.

  I always sort of thought I’d be a failure. I still sort of think I might be a failure. So just having a book out in the world made me very happy. I didn’t much think, at first, about whether I was going to sell a lot of copies. I didn’t pay attention to that sort of thing. I still don’t. I don’t think I have ever, not even once, willingly checked to see how many copies anything by me has sold.

  In the years since my “big break,” I have mainly made a living by writing, but also by teaching and doing campus workshops and appearances.

  It’s really hard for me to calve off the writing part from the just being alive part, and so I don’t imagine I can really find a “best time” that just refers to my writing life. I think maybe the best thing that ever happened to me was becoming a father in 2008, although a close second would be checking myself into the psychiatric hospital in 1987. That turned out to be a very good move. I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

  Hard time

  Writing is always hard. As we all know, there’s a lot of rejection involved.

  Even now I find the rejection part of the job pretty challenging. I am not a strong enough person, in some ways, to live this life. I try not to envy other writers. I think nothing is worse for me, and for literature and the literary world. And don’t even get me started on reviews.

  I don’t solve personal problems for myself by writing. The writing is the escape from the personal. Sometimes I cause problems, writing first and only thinking later. Those can only be solved in the usual ways, through time, conversation, willingness to reconcile, etc.

  I think the good for me comes in continuing to work and trying, a little bit, to believe in what I do.

  Caution: reading can lead to writing

  I like books, the actual, physical things. I like to carry them around. I don’t mind how heavy they are, and I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles on my books.

  Before I ever wrote, I was a voracious reader. Both my parents are people who always have a novel they’re reading. A kind of object fetishism of book as a sacred object runs in my family and was imparted to me at a young age. I don’t know exactly how long the book as we know it will exist, but I fully e
xpect to make it to my death without having to give up on books.

  Merciless

  My big ambition is to avoid doing the same thing twice. The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is an essential part of my personality, and I judge myself very, very harshly. I am all but entirely merciless about myself and my work. Alas. Those who are otherwise are probably healthier.

  Rick Moody’s Wisdom for Writers

  Trying to fit your writing into conventional commercial forms in hopes of getting published is a losing proposition. Losing more interesting experimental work to the constraints of the publishing industry would be a great loss for us all.

  Structure in a novel is something you discover, not something you superimpose. Don’t sit at your keyboard and be a slave to an outline.

  When you’re writing a novel, you have to keep the whole thing in your head. So it’s good to go somewhere quiet to work, and it’s good if you can find the time to binge on the work for a few days without interruption.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Walter Mosley

  Somewhere beyond my line of sight a man groaned, pathetically. It sounded as if he had reached the end of his reserves and was now about to die.

  But I couldn’t stop to see what the problem was. I was too deep into the rhythm of working the hard belly of the speed bag. That air-filled leather bladder was hitting its suspension plate faster than any basketball the NBA could imagine.Ȧ

  —Opening lines, When the Thrill Is Gone, 2011

  In the fine tradition of Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe—two of Walter Mosley’s influences, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Langston Hughes, Dashiell Hammett, and Graham Greene—Mosley is inextricably linked to Easy Rawlins, the protagonist and namesake of his best-known mystery series. Some other associations: Bill Clinton. Blue Dress.

  Not Lewinsky’s blue dress, the one in the title of Mosley’s first published book and first movie adaptation, Devil in a Blue Dress. As for the presidential connection, in 1992, candidate Bill Clinton famously called Mosley his favorite author.

  At age sixty, nearly thirty years after he began writing, Mosley told me, “The fact that I ever got published is still amazing to me.” Against all odds, maybe, but not amazing at all to anyone who has had the pleasure of reading his lightning prose.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: January 12, 1952

  Born and raised: Watts, Los Angeles, California

  Current home: New York, New York

  Love life: Divorced

  Schooling: Victory Baptist Day School; Goddard College; graduated from Johnson State College, 1977; studied writing at City College of New York

  Day job?: No

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Anisfield-Wolf Award; Grammy Award; two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Literary Work—Fiction; Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award; O. Henry Award; Sundance Institute’s Risktaker Award; Carl Brandon Parallax Award; honorary doctorate from City College of New York

  Notable notes:

  • Mosley’s mother was Polish Jewish; his father was African American.

  • After high school Mosley spent time in Santa Cruz, California, and went to Europe; he dropped out of Goddard; and he began work toward a doctorate in political theory, then abandoned it.

  • William Matthews, Edna O’Brien, and Frederic Tuten were Mosley’s mentors.

  Website: www.waltermosley.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/waltermosleyauthor

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Easy Rawlins Mysteries

  Devil in a Blue Dress, 1990

  A Red Death, 1991

  White Butterfly, 1992

  Black Betty, 1994

  A Little Yellow Dog, 1996

  Gone Fishin’, 1997

  Bad Boy Brawly Brown, 2002

  Six Easy Pieces, 2003

  Little Scarlet, 2004

  Cinnamon Kiss, 2005

  Blonde Faith, 2007

  Fearless Jones Mysteries

  Fearless Jones, 2001

  Fear Itself, 2003

  Fear of the Dark, 2006

  Leonid McGill Mysteries

  The Long Fall, 2009

  Known to Evil, 2010

  When the Thrill Is Gone, 2011

  All I Did Was Shoot My Man, 2012

  Science Fiction

  Blue Light, 1998

  Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World, 2001

  The Wave, 2005

  Socrates Fortlow Books

  Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 1997

  Walkin’ the Dog, 1999

  The Right Mistake, 2008

  Young Adult Novel

  47, 2005

  Other Novels

  RL’s Dream, 1995

  The Man in My Basement, 2004

  Fortunate Son, 2006

  The Tempest Tales, 2008

  The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, 2010

  Erotica

  Killing Johnny Fry, 2006

  Diablerie, 2007

  Nonfiction

  Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History, 2000

  What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace, 2003

  Life Out of Context, 2006

  This Year You Write Your Novel, 2007

  Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation, 2011

  Graphic Novel

  Maximum Fantastic Four, 2005

  Film and TV Adaptations

  Devil in a Blue Dress, 1995

  Fallen Angels, TV, 1995

  Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, 1997

  Play

  The Fall of Heaven, 2010

  Walter Mosley

  Why I write

  I really love putting words together to tell stories. It’s a great thing to do. I can’t think of a reason not to write. I guess one reason would be that nobody was buying my books. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t stop me. I’d be writing anyway.

  It’s not like writing has been a lifelong thing for me. I’ve been drawing since I was little. I used to draw every day. But I only started writing in my thirties, and I fell in love with it. It’s like a relationship. You meet someone, and suddenly you’re in love when you didn’t expect it. I could ask you why you’re in love, but you wouldn’t be able to tell me.

  I like writing, but I don’t fetishize it. If I write a sentence I really like, it’s the same great feeling as when I do anything well: play an electronic game, play chess. There are more moments like that when I’m writing than when I’m doing anything else. But even when I’m just walking down the street, my life is a life of imagination.

  Fire ants

  Before I was a writer, I was a computer programmer. I didn’t hate it, but there was no meaning to it. I didn’t come home and imagine myself inside of my work, the way I do now.

  One day I was at my job as a consulting programmer for Mobil Oil. It was on a weekend, so there was no one in the office. I was tired of writing programs, so I wrote this sentence: “On hot sticky days in southern Louisiana, the fire ants swarmed.” I’d never been to Louisiana, and I’d never seen a fire ant, but I thought, “This sounds like the first line of a novel. Maybe I can write fiction.” So I wrote my first book.

  No one wanted to publish it. I couldn’t even get an agent. The book isn’t about white people or black women, and no one wanted to read about black men.

  I thought I’d never get published. I decided I’d keep working, maybe take some classes to learn about writing, get a teaching job. After I’d been writing for about four years, I wrote Devil in a Blue Dress and gave it to a writer friend of mine. He gave it to his agent, and she said she’d like to represent it. She sold it within six weeks. Publishers were all looking for different kinds of mysteries. They thought a black mystery was a unique thing. It was a handle they could use to sell it.

  The best moment of my career was getting my first book sold. It was so unexpected. I called my dad and said, “I sol
d a book. They paid me the same amount of money that I make in a year.” He didn’t believe it; I didn’t, either.

  That’s how it all started. The book did okay, and people started paying attention to me. The best thing was I didn’t have to work anymore, which was amazing.

  Once I got started…

  I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I have three or four novels in my computer right now that nobody’s bought. I haven’t showed them to my agent. She says, “Not another book, Walter. I don’t have time to read this book.”

  I had a collection of six novellas that I sent to her. She said, “Walter, I can’t read this. I have other clients. I have four other books from you that I haven’t had time to read!” I feel the same way I felt before my first book was published. I know they’re good books. If you don’t want to publish them, fine. Sooner or later someone’s going to publish them.

  Rejection can be sexy

  The worst moment in a writer’s life is the perpetual recurring moment, and that’s rejection.

  If you keep writing what you want to write, you’re going to get a lot of rejection. “We’re not printing this novel; it has too much sex in it.” “We’re not printing this nonfiction book; you’re not a talking head. Who do you think you are?”

  Rejection is always painful, but you learn to enjoy it. It’s part of an incredible life, and you have to realize that you couldn’t have this life without this pain. That pain becomes eroticized in a way. You kind of enjoy it. You love to get together with other writers and talk about the worst rejection you ever had.

  I got a review in Publishers Weekly once: the guy said my characters weren’t even strong cardboard. I love saying that to people. It’s so funny. It’s a terrible thing to say about any writer, even a writer who’s in third grade, but hey, my book got published, so that’s okay with me.

  This is what I’ve decided to do. I’m like a boxer: getting hit is the worst moment and the best moment. I’m just trying to survive.

  My problem

  This sounds so crazy, but my biggest problem is capitalism. It works like this. People produce products on an assembly line, and then they’re sold. If it’s your job to put the front fender on the Pinto, you don’t put the brakes in. You can’t just decide to change what your job is.